Best Places for Data Science Jobs

Best Places for Data Science Jobs

Coming off of Strata + Hadoop World last week, there is no question that the field of data science is exponentially growing right now. If you did not get to attend that event, check out the awesome free ebooks and webcasts. I also covered this topic in the last Industry Pulse magazine.

Who to Watch

Everyone seems to be getting into data science. Salesforce Einstein is being featured at Dreamforce (#DF16) this week. It is cool to see BeyondCore now cooked into the #1 Salesforce CRM. I told you BeyondCore was awesome after the Gartner 2015 conference. Then I covered them a few times this past year. Practically a day after my August 2016 deep dive article, they got scooped up by Marc Benioff!

Other top players in this space right now include Google, IBM, SAS, Amazon AWS, Microsoft, and more. You name a vendor, data science is on the menu. Hot projects to watch include:

The advanced analytics competency conversation has risen all the way to board and executive levels. Today we are seeing new C-level, Chief Analytics Officer (CAO) and Chief Data Officer (CDO) roles created to maximize the value of organizational data assets, improve decision making and enhance business processes.

Data Science Day

If you are thinking of going into data science and want an extremely fast-paced, running start into this domain, consider a data science day with me.

I finally have decided to offer a one day class after many inquiries and a bit of encouragement from my peers to do so.

Although I rarely teach, I do enjoy sharing my love for advanced analytics and inspiring others. I recently gave a class to a peer group in North Carolina. They convinced me that the lessons were truly valuable, fun and that I should get out of my house once in a while to teach again. If you are interested in that class, please contact me.

Job Trends

Ten years ago when I learned data mining from Dean Abbott, finding real-world projects and jobs to apply my data science skills were few and far between. Today that is no longer the case. In fact, reviewing Indeed reveals a steady increase in data science related postings.

Indeed Job Trends

Thanks to Michelle Billick from GoodCall for freely sharing her team’s 2016 Data Science research with my readers. The following excerpts are from that report. For more information, check out her research summary article, methodology and sources posted on the GoodCall site.

“One position keeps topping the lists of hottest careers for 2016: data scientist. The job, which involves using quantitative and technological skills to analyze data, was named “sexiest job of the 21st century” by Harvard Business Review. Studies show that data scientists can make over $250,000, with a median base salary of $96,000. And they’re in incredibly high demand, due to the ever-increasing availability of data – and the belief that companies need to be smarter about it.

It’s clear that data scientist is the new hot job. And GoodCall wanted to find out where those jobs are. GoodCall analysts evaluated available data scientist jobs in 5,000 cities across the U.S. to see which areas offer the best career opportunities for current or aspiring data scientist. See our full results and key facts below.

Jen Underwood is a Senior Director at DataRobot and founder of Impact Analytix, LLC. She has a unique blend of product management and “hands-on” experience in data warehousing, reporting, visualization, and advanced analytics. In addition to keeping a constant pulse on industry trends, she enjoys digging into oceans of data to solve complex problems with machine learning.
Over the past 20 years, Jen has held worldwide product management roles at Microsoft and served as a technical lead for system implementation firms. She has experience launching new products and turning around failed projects. Most recently she provided advisory, strategy, educational content development, and marketing services to 100+ technology vendors through her own firm. She has been mentioned by KD Nuggets, Information Management and Forbes for her work. She also has written for InformationWeek, O’Reilly Media, and numerous other tech industry publications.
Jen has a Bachelor of Business Administration – Marketing, Cum Laude from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and a post-graduate certificate in Computer Science – Data Mining from the University of California, San Diego. She was also honored to be a former IBM Analytics Insider, Tableau Zen Master, and Top 10 Women Influencer.